Rep. Byron Donalds’s medical education consists of a bachelor’s degree in finance and marketing from Florida State University. But the Florida Republican played a doctor on TV over the weekend, telling Fox News host Maria Bartiromo that, after examining President Biden, he suspects the president is receiving a secret medication that makes him appear to be sharp-witted and totally on the ball.
“The American people need to understand if they’re giving him some injection so that he can actually look like he’s coherent,” Donalds said.
Dr. Donalds seemed not to have considered the obvious possibility that Biden looks like he’s cogent and clear because he is cogent and clear. Still, the good doctor’s diagnosis raises some key questions that must be considered:
There is a shot that cures incoherence in one dose? How can I get some? Why has nobody thought to give it to Kevin McCarthy all these years? And why, for that matter, doesn’t Dr. Donalds, who seems to think he should be Donald Trump’s running mate, inject his prospective boss with the stuff? Just last week, Trump’s attempt at saying “carried out by radical Democrats” came out as “carried owby rgbgb tdai.”
Donalds was obviously trying to please Trump, who had just announced he would “demand a drug test” of Biden before going on the debate stage. (Another VP aspirant on Bartiromo’s show Sunday morning, Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, also loyally endorsed the demand for a drug test.) “He’s going to be so jacked up for those debates, you watch,” Trump predicted. Apparently, Trump realized he had set expectations for Biden a bit too low when he said the incumbent “can’t talk” and “can’t put two sentences together,” so he was attempting to come up with an alternative explanation for when Biden proves to be thoroughly compos mentis. That’s how Trump explained Biden’s energetic delivery of his State of the Union address in March: “He was high as a kite.”
A group of House members calling itself the “GOP Doctors Caucus” is debasing itself to substantiate Trump’s fabrication. A few days before Donalds offered his diagnosis to Bartiromo, Rep. Greg Murphy (N.C.), a co-chair of the “caucus,” told the Fox anchor that he had proof that Biden was drugged. “I absolutely believe that from a medical viewpoint,” said Murphy, speaking like a neurologist, although he is, in fact, a urologist. “I actually have a little bit of good knowledge that that had captained — that that had happened,” he added.
That had captained? Give that man a coherence injection! “You know, maybe we can talk offline and I’ll show you something that I think that proves that,” Murphy offered to Bartiromo.
Even Bartiromo, a reliable Trump mouthpiece, was skeptical. “You’ll show me what?” she asked. Bartiromo’s promised “follow up” on this supposed evidence never came, though she did later repeat for her viewers that “the GOP Doctors Caucus chairman did say, ‘I have experienced this and I know this for sure.’”
Not since then-Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) wrongly diagnosed the brain activity of a comatose woman 20 years ago has a doctor-legislator committed such malpractice. But it was to be expected from the “GOP Doctors Caucus,” which counts among its 19 members five dentists and two pharmacists. Another of its co-chairmen, Rep. Brad Wenstrup (Ohio), is a podiatrist, and he used his extensive knowledge of the human foot to lead the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic through its attempt to validate various conspiracy theories. Another member of the caucus, Rep. Andy Harris (Md.), proudly prescribed the deworming medicine ivermectin as a covid treatment, and still another, Rep. Ronny Jackson (Tex.), was dubbed the “Candyman” for his liberal dispensing of pills as White House physician.
Trump’s accusation that Biden is using performance-enhancing drugs is a retread; he used the same attack on Biden in 2020 and against Hillary Clinton in 2016. Still, we can’t dismiss Trump’s own medical qualifications, which include his pioneering discovery that covid could be cured by injecting bleach into people’s lungs and his dogged advocacy of hydroxychloroquine as a covid cure, which led people to consume fish-tank cleaner.
And drug use isn’t entirely unknown to our nation’s political leaders. Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.) alleged on CNN that his former House colleague Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) “would brag about how he would crush ED medicine and chase it with energy drinks so he could go all night.” Then-Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-N.C.) alleged that he had watched some of his colleagues “do a key bump of cocaine right in front of you.” This followed by several years the resignation of Rep. Trey Radel (R-Fla.), who was caught buying cocaine from an undercover federal agent.
At the time, I didn’t believe Cawthorn’s claims of drug-fueled orgies in the House Republican caucus. But now these guys would have us believe that the president has reversed an advanced case of dementia by taking a magical elixir unknown to medical science? They must be high.
